


whatever one loves most

by rain_sleet_snow



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: Building A Home, Clone Wars as History, Established Relationship, F/F, Hurt/Comfort, Lesbians in Space, Original Trilogy as History, Planet Nevarro (Star Wars), Planet Sorgan (Star Wars), Step-parents, Women Being Awesome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-06
Updated: 2020-12-06
Packaged: 2021-03-10 03:54:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,143
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27917809
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rain_sleet_snow/pseuds/rain_sleet_snow
Summary: “Hell of a woman,” Greef said, without looking up, when Cara came in. “What made her look twice at you, Dune? She looks like the settling down type.”“I shoot good,” Cara said dryly, ignoring the bit about settling down.You’d like Nevarro, she remembered writing.We’re making something real here. “But not as good as she does.”Greef’s eyebrows shot up his forehead like they were powered with coaxium.
Relationships: Baby Yoda (The Mandalorian TV) & Cara Dune, Baby Yoda (The Mandalorian TV) & Din Djarin, Cara Dune & Greef Karga, Cara Dune & Winta, Cara Dune/Omera, Omera & Winta (Star Wars)
Comments: 23
Kudos: 86





	whatever one loves most

**Author's Note:**

> "whatever one loves most is beautiful", Sappho, because wlw poets only for my Cara/Omera fic. Mandalorian episode 14 stressed me out so much I had to write fluff, and then, because it's me, the fluff grew a plot.
> 
> Thanks to cosmonauthill for reading this over.

When she introduced Omera to Greef, his jaw didn’t visibly drop, but Cara could see him thinking it. And also see him thinking about kissing the hand Omera had held out to shake.

  
She glared at him.

“It’s not often we see ladies of such calibre on Nevarro,” Greef said. 

Omera gave him her loveliest smile, and the handshake that (Cara knew from experience) felt like your hand was being crushed in a vise. “You’re too kind, Magistrate. Cara has told me all about you.”

“Only good things, I hope,” Greef said jovially. Omera’s smile only broadened.

“Well,” Greef said, and couldn’t hide the slight unsettlement in his eyes. Cara felt a smirk twist her lips. “I’ll leave you to get settled.”

  
  


Cara’s place was new, and didn’t really feel like hers yet. She’d shared Greef’s apartment for a while, until the town was scoured out, and she felt like she could take her eyes off him for two minutes without him getting shot. He’d ordered Glefat to sort somewhere out for her, and Cara didn’t trust that guy as far as she could throw him - hadn’t, since Greef had told her about the body count his  _ creative accountancy _ had ended up with, one the Mythrol only pretended to care about if you reminded him of it - but he had taste. So the place was clean and pleasant and well-located, and pretty secure, too. She’d told him what he wanted and he’d followed her instructions to the letter. 

She wasn’t the person who’d hung a blue light and a sign that said  _ marshal  _ outside, though. The townsfolk had been a bit freaked out by her initially, but it turned out that throwing evildoers headfirst into the dirt made you pretty popular with the kind of people they’d been terrorising. It was nice - weird, but nice - to think that people knew where to find her, and were pleased to have her be part of their community. She could get a hot meal in any one of a dozen houses round town, any day she asked.

It reminded her of Sorgan. The good bits, involving the village, not the bad bits, involving the bar.

Thinking of Sorgan, Cara looked at her guests and clocked that Winta was either going to sit down or fall over in the next five seconds. She caught the kid, and slung her gently onto a sofa that possibly had more toast crumbs on than she’d realised before letting Omera into her house.

“Spacelag,” she said, watching Winta mumble and curl herself more tightly against the cushions. “Jumps like that always fuck with your sense of time.”

“As far as we’re concerned, it’s midnight,” Omera said, smiling down at Winta, and covering her own yawn. “Well past this one’s bedtime. I’m sorry, where are our manners?”

“Forget it,” Cara said, a little rawer than she meant. “The last person I want you to feel like you have to be polite with is me.” She caught Omera’s eye, and looked away, cursing the blush creeping up her chest. She grabbed a blanket from the top of the sofa, and shook it out over Winta. “May as well leave her here, but… come on, let me show you your room.”

The house had two bedrooms, and something that should probably be Cara’s office. Her job still mostly involved beating the crap out of people, and though she kept reasonable records of who and why, she still didn’t have much occasion to sit at a desk - which was how she liked it. So the office was mostly gathering dust. She wondered about putting Winta’s cot in there instead, and then decided to just leave it to the expert. Omera was looking about the guest room, painted in cool shades that picked up the nice sunny days they got here and didn’t look too fucking grim on the grey ones, and smiling faintly.

Cara remembered Glefat handing her the keys, and babbling about her bringing another sentient back now she had the privacy,  _ you must have noticed half the town has an eye for you, bet you could find a nice cob - no, wait, humans don’t do cobs and pens, what kind of - and you’d be a pen? I think you’d be a pen - uh, okay, I’ll go now _ . She had glowered him out of the house and halfway down the street, but later, lying sleepless on her new bed, she had thought about Omera who kept writing to her, how Omera would look under cool moonlight, how she’d thrive on basalt the way she stifled in that fucking swamp, how she’d turn the kitchen upside down until it suited her.

And now she was here. Cara opened her mouth and closed it again.

“It’s lovely,” Omera said. “Thank you for inviting us to stay.”

  
  
“I’m glad you’re here,” Cara said, and her voice cracked on it. She coughed to clear her throat. “Uh, I need to go and check in with Greef - Magistrate Karga, and you must be tired.” She dug a spare keycard out of her pocket, and pressed it into Omera’s hand. “In case you need to find me - well, pretty much everyone knows who I am. I’ll see you tonight.”

“I look forward to it,” Omera said gravely, and Cara felt dizzy all the way down to the street.

  
  


Greef had his feet up on his desk, and was paging absently through missives from the Guild.

“Hell of a woman,” he said, without looking up, when Cara came in. “What made her look twice at you, Dune? She looks like the settling down type.”

“I shoot good,” Cara said dryly, ignoring the bit about settling down.  _ You’d like Nevarro _ , she remembered writing.  _ We’re making something real here _ . “But not as good as she does.” 

Greef’s eyebrows shot up his forehead like they were powered with coaxium. 

“Anyway,” Cara said. “I could’ve been anyone. Imagine if you’d said that to Glefat.”

“Glefat,” Greef said, with the particular poisonous sweetness he reserved for the Mythrol - he’d been sincerely fond of the Twi’lek enforcer Glefat’s escapades got killed: that was Greef’s problem, if he forgot to stop thinking of people as a job he got attached all too easily - “couldn’t get a woman like that if he tried for a thousand years.”   


  
“Mythrols don’t live that long.”   


  
“Glefat certainly won’t.” Greef took his feet off the desk. “I got someone coming in later this afternoon.”

Cara raised her eyebrows. “You’re expecting trouble?”

“No,” Greef said contemplatively. “But I think we should make it clear… Nevarro is open for legitimate business. No… freelancers.”

“Nobody who doesn’t pay tax,” Cara translated. 

“You get the point,” Greef said.

  
  


Cara came home in the early evening with takeout, and hoped she’d brought enough, and that Omera and Winta would like it. Blue shrimp weren’t a thing here, but the sea wasn’t far off, and smoked fish dishes were pretty popular. Omera met her at the door; her hair was still wet from the fresher, and her smile was still breathtaking.

If it wasn’t already all round Nevarro that the Marshal had a lady staying with her, Cara would eat her body armour.

“Winta’s fallen back asleep,” Omera said. “She was awake most of the afternoon, but dropped straight off as soon as the sun hit the horizon.” Her smile broadened. “She’ll be sorry to miss you. She had a lot of questions.”

Cara knew a vague sense of foreboding. “I’ll be around all day tomorrow.” 

“I’m glad.” 

They moved into the kitchen. Omera already moved around like it was her house, which was good, because - Cara wanted it to be her house, wanted -

Cara cleared her throat, and held up the takeaway tubs. “Dinner,” she announced unnecessarily. “It’s this smoked fish soup stuff, and rolls.”

“Sounds good,” Omera said. “I can’t tell you how sick I got of shipboard rations. I can’t believe I used to live on them.”

  
  
“Try military,” Cara said. “Or maybe don’t.” 

“Maybe not.” Omera took the tubs from Cara’s hands, and set them down on the table. “Cara?”

She was standing so close Cara’s heart thundered in her ears. “Yeah?”

“Can I kiss you?”

“Always,” Cara said, and leaned across the centimetres between them to catch Omera’s lips with her own, catch Omera’s waist with her hands, catch fire between both of them.

Omera hummed with satisfaction against Cara’s mouth, and slid her arms around Cara’s neck. “Some things,” she said, “you can’t get from holomessages.”

  
  


Omera signed Winta up for school, started the ball rolling on her own secondary education, and didn't move out. Nobody acted like they expected her to.

"As Magistrate of this fine town I technically have the authority to carry out a wedding ceremony," Greef said, while they were supposed to be planning a raid on a knot of stormtroopers holed up ten klicks out. They'd survived this long without preying on the town, so Cara had focused on more proximate things, but they were getting desperate - and dangerous.

"Shut up," Cara said absently, thinking about where a sniper would be perfect, thinking about Omera lying deadly still and patient on the roof of one of the Sorgan houses, waiting for Cara and Din to come back, waiting for any other uninvited guests who might join the party.

"I am just saying. Those must have been most persuasive holomessages."

"You try persuading Omera into anything," Cara said with a snort. "You'll end up in over your head."

"Ah," Greef said, and when Cara looked up he was frowning. "And that's where you are? In over your head?"

Omera's smile, her dark secretive eyes, her silver voice. The guest bedroom Winta had mostly to herself, these days.

"I'm exactly where I want to be," Cara said, and heard the unfamiliar soft note in her voice even as she saw Greef's face soften. She cleared her throat and scowled. "Can we focus, Magistrate?"

  
  


Omera took a job at the bar. Cara didn't get called out there a lot: even in the early days most people just wanted to drink in peace. But she'd started stopping in out of habit, not to drink herself stupid like she might have done once, but just to have one drink, hear the news, take the pulse, make her presence felt. The locals liked to know she had an eye on any visitors, and it was easy to oblige them. As a matter of professional pride, she already knew all about any visitors.

Cara knew Omera had mentioned the job, and all the ways it fit her requirements: the pay, the way it worked around Winta's school and Omera's long-delayed secondary education, the fact that the manager had no objections to Winta sitting in the stock room to do her homework, if she wanted. She still came to a halt when she stopped by the bar mid-evening and saw Omera behind it, wiping down the counter efficiently. She'd pulled her hair up on the back of her head, and the way she moved told Omera that like the other bar staff she had a small weapon of some kind hidden away - probably a blaster, knowing Omera. The bar had been a mess, after the Imps got through with it, and for a while afterwards it had been a target. Omera already looked like she knew it backwards.

Cara caught her breath back again and sauntered up to the bar, trying to act natural. She slid onto a seat by Omera's section of counter and said "Hey."

Omera looked up at her through her eyelashes and smiled. "Ila told me to expect you. What are you having?"

"Just a soda." Cara felt like she might be drunk already, and she needed a clear head for the rest of her rounds. "Put it on my -"

"Tab, yes, Ila also mentioned that." Omera opened a soda, and slid it across the bar. "Any trouble?" 

Cara shook her head. "All quiet. You?"

"The same." 

Cara twisted on her seat and let her eyes roam over the bar. "If anyone gives you any trouble…"

Omera leaned over the bar, still cleaning the glass she'd picked up after handing over Cara's soda. Busy hands, Cara noticed. Omera was always busy with something, and if she wanted to linger over talking to you, she'd pick something she could use as an excuse. "I'll keep it in mind, but I don't think I'll have an issue." Her smile grew. "Everyone is very polite so far. One curious thing, though."

Cara caught her eye.

"Some of the non-locals seem to think my surname is Dune," Omera said solemnly, just as Cara took a gulp of soda and promptly choked on it. 

"You're a menace," Cara croaked, through Omera's laughter.

Omera only smiled, madonna-like, inscrutable. Mischievous as all  _ shit _ , Cara thought, coughing for breath.

"Winta's at home?" Cara said, when she'd recovered her breath, if not her dignity. 

Omera nodded. "She had dinner with a friend, whose parents will take her home."

"I'll check on her." 

"Please do." Omera rolled her eyes. "She was talking about coming to pick me up."

Cara restrained a snort. The kid had good instincts. She clinked her bottle against Omera's second cleaned glass. "Consider it done."

"My knight in shining armour," Omera murmured, another one of those secret smiles curling around her mouth, and whisked away to take an order. Cara shook her head and took another gulp of her soda, casting a glance at the mirror behind the bar to see who was in tonight that she might not have spotted.

When she'd finished the drink she headed off to complete her round. She got the usual bunch of scattered greetings, and a couple of looks that suggested people would be stopping by with information some time when she was somewhere less public. One of the shopkeepers actually stopped her, though, and Cara felt her eyebrows lift.

"Seems like your guest is getting pretty permanent, marshal," he said, jerking his head at the bar. 

Cara glanced back, and saw Omera laughing with one of the other bartenders. "She's as permanent as she likes," Cara said. 

"Good," Marten said. "Good for you. More families in this town, that's good."

Cara did  _ not _ turn red. "We agree there," she said, and gave him a polite but clearly dismissing nod. "Excuse me."

The town remained as quiet as it had been before; Cara warned off a couple of visitors hanging around in shadows like they thought there might be prey handy, and checked all the usual spots and some of the unusual ones for miscreants. Nothing.

She looped back, and was not surprised to see lights on in her house.

"Your mom would tell you," Cara said, ignoring the way Winta jumped and swore, "it's past your bedtime." As an afterthought, she added: "Also to watch your language." She crossed to the chiller and pulled out the jug of filtered water. 

"You're not my mom."

"I'm also not a hypocrite. I don't care if you swear." Cara swept her eyes over the table. An incomplete worksheet lay over the others, but Cara had heard cartoons when she slipped through the front door. She would bet good money Winta had already worked the answers out, probably on the back of the sheet. "Waiting up for her?"

"Yeah," Winta said defiantly.

Cara nodded. "Good idea. Will you go to bed if I promise to pick her up?"

She didn't tell Winta she had to sleep. Most kids might not notice that, but Cara watched the way Winta's eyes narrowed. She picked up on it fine.

"Yeah," Winta said slowly. "Okay. If you do it."

Cara saluted. Winta grinned, a lightning flash breaking her solemn face into laughter. Omera smiled like it was a secret; Winta must have got that suddenness from her dad.

"School all right?" Cara asked, a few minutes later. 

"Yeah," Winta said, obviously surprised, pausing as she filled out the rest of the last sheet and packed up her homework. "It's fine." She paused. "I like it better than distance school."

"Good," Cara said. "Wear earphones if you want to watch cartoons and not get caught. I heard them when I opened the door."

Winta scrunched up her face. "Then I can't hear Mama coming."

"So wear one earphone," Cara said, and carefully didn't grin when Winta smacked her forehead, muttering. She glanced at the clock. "I'll leave in ten minutes. So you have half an hour to make it look like you went to bed when your mom told you to."

" _ Aughhh _ ," Winta said, and scuttled up the stairs like the world's smallest, noisiest herd of bantha. 

  
  


In another life, back on Alderaan, Cara might have hung around outside the bar, smoking cigarras and pretending to be dangerous. But she was closer to forty than twenty now, Alderaan was long gone, and she'd quit cigarras on Echo Base for the very simple reason that it was too fucking cold to stand around smoking them. She just walked straight in and found Omera hanging up her apron and shrugging on her jacket while Ila went through the takings.

"We're closed," Ila yelled. "Fuck off."

"I'm not here to drink," Cara called back. Ila looked up, her eyes darted over to Omera, and a truly shit-eating grin spread across her face. 

"Well, well," she said. "Fancy seeing you here, marshal." 

Omera, zipping up her jacket, remained resolutely silent, and possibly - just possibly - slightly pink about the cheeks. Cara grinned. 

"I did wonder," Ila said, pitching it loud to cover the whole bar, "if maybe -"

" _ Goodnight _ , Ila," Omera said, dragging Cara out of the bar by main force. She didn't let go of Cara's hand when they were out in the cool night air; Cara tucked her under her arm instead. 

"I can walk ten minutes by myself, you know," Omera said. 

"Oh, I know," Cara said, hand sliding over the butt of her blaster, eyes automatically scanning the shadows. "But I also know everyone currently in this town, and some of them I don't want getting the idea that you always walk home by yourself after getting off shift at a certain time. These days if you shoot someone I have to fill out paperwork."

There had been quite a lot of bodies on Sorgan. Omera aimed for center mass, like the rest of the villagers Mando had drilled, but you could always pick out the ones she shot by the tight circle of blaster burn around the heart. 

"Oh no," Omera said. " _ Paperwork _ ."

"And maybe I thought you might like the company."

"Maybe I do," Omera said, and slid her hand into the back pocket of Cara's trousers.

  
  


The house was dark and quiet when they got back, and Winta was pretending most convincingly to be asleep. Cara didn't comment on the earphone trailing from under her pillow. She left Omera using the fresher - hot water was easy to come by here, at least, even if the geothermal pipe system was getting elderly - and made a cup of tea. Omera had brought a couple of packets of the stuff she used to drink on Sorgan, and rationed them out carefully; Cara made her own cup with something else, and let her hands heat around the warmth of the kettle.

"Special occasion," Omera remarked, when she got back upstairs and put the cup into Omera's hands. Of course she knew it by scent.

"Not every day you start a new job," Cara said. She sat down on her side of the bed and kicked off her boots. "And now I know you're staying."

Omera went still like she was surprised; Cara could feel it in the air. Then she set her cup down with a clink on the bedside table, and the mattress dipped as she climbed onto the bed and leaned across to brush Cara's hair over her shoulder and kiss the exposed sliver of her neck. Cara reached back and clasped her hand, trying not to squeeze too tight.

"I'm staying," Omera murmured, and Cara leaned back into her, letting out a long breath. "And you're getting in the fresher."

"Is that a complaint?"

Omera kissed the point under Cara's ear where her pulse beat shallow at the surface. "It's an order," she said, and Cara laughed.

  
  


The upside of being the marshal was feeling like she had a place and a purpose, and getting to kick a lot of ass. In Cara's book, that more than made up for the occasional scrape or bruise. She got the feeling, when she came back from chucking a spice-ridden dumbfuck of a Nautolan in the lockup and Omera actually dropped a datapad at the sight of her, that Omera might feel slightly differently.

"You look like that AT-AT stood on you," Omera said, with feeling. She was gripping the kitchen table hard, the datapad with her schoolwork face down on it, forgotten. 

Cara glanced down at herself. Pretty mucky, yeah, and a fair bit of blood, not all of it Nautolan indigo. "It's fine," she said. "Just a couple of scrapes here and there."

"Get in the fresher," Omera said, an unmistakable ring of authority in her voice. 

"It's fine," Cara repeated. "Aren't you in the middle of a test?" 

"It's only a mock test," Omera said. "It doesn't matter."

"Finish it," Cara said, flapping a hand at her. "I'll come back when I'm clean, okay? And you can make a fuss over me then." 

"I'll come up to you. Tell me when you're ready."

Cara went upstairs, dumped her clothes into the laundry bin - it had just appeared in the fresher and she had obediently started using it; previously she had just bundled things into a pile, and then into the laundry if she had time - and started the slow process of sluicing off someone else’s blood. The Nautolan wasn’t badly injured - a nicked tentacle, a broken nose, both of which could be properly treated when he was no longer claiming to see rainbow-coloured Jedi rising from the floor - but apparently both, on Nautolans, bled like fuck for a while. And he’d been waving around a knife which had caused the nicked tentacle as well as the shallow slices on Cara’s arm, before Cara had punched him hard in the face and squeezed his wrist until she thought the bones might burst, and his tendons gave in and let the knife fall. 

The hot water stung, and the dried blood didn’t want to shift from her skin. Cara winced, but kept scrubbing, and as an afterthought pulled out the braid in her hair and washed that too. She’d slapped rough bandages on her scrapes: she took them off and rinsed them properly, swearing under her breath. Funny how the littlest things hurt the most, sometimes. This was nothing. She might not even have bothered to worry about the bleeding once, when she was younger and stupider and had more people to chase her into medical facilities.

She got out of the fresher when she was pretty sure she was clean all the way through, and replaced the dressings on her arm to contain any seeping for a while, before dressing in clean clothes and brushing out and towelling her hair. Now she was back in her own home, front door locked, with someone worrying about her down below, her arm hurt whenever she moved it: she muttered to herself, but didn’t call out for Omera until she could hear the other woman moving about restlessly down below.

  
“Omera?” she yelled.

“Coming,” Omera shouted back, gratifyingly quickly, and appeared in Cara’s bedroom with a first aid kit almost indecently fast. Cara could see tension leak out of her shoulders when she saw Cara clean, dry and dressed.

“Looking more respectable?” Cara asked, raising her eyebrows and grinning. 

“I wasn’t aware  _ respectable _ was in your vocabulary,” Omera retorted. “You look less like something the lothcat dragged in.” She sat down on Cara’s injured side. “What happened? A fight?”   


  
“Just some idiot too high to know what he was doing. With a knife.”   


  
Omera sighed, and peeled back the dressings one after the other, laying them carefully on the lid of the open first aid box. “Well, it doesn’t look as awful as I thought.” 

“I’m hard to kill.”   


  
Omera rolled her eyes, but refrained from comment. “You rinsed these? And the dressings are brand new?”

Cara nodded. 

Omera prodded carefully at the cuts, and let out a breath. “Okay.” She took out disinfectant spray, and plastered the cuts liberally in the stuff; Cara sucked in a breath and swore. “You big baby. I thought you were supposed to be tough.”   


  
“It stings,” Cara said. “You should kiss it better.”   


  
“I should bandage it up and leave you to your paperwork,” Omera said primly. She was frowning so hard it was almost a scowl. “We should have a real doctor here. A clinic. Who would fix you up if I wasn’t here?”   


  
“I could do it myself,” Cara pointed out. “And there’s a guy who lives on the edge of town used to be a nurse. Garth. There was an Imperial-run clinic here back before the New Republic got into the Outer Rim, and after that there was a small doctor’s practice - Garth worked for them - but they didn’t pay protection money, so…” Cara shrugged. “Before my time. A clinic would need the community to get together and invest in it. And we’ve been mostly focused on cleaning up and keeping the kids off the streets.”

“Well,” Omera said, tongue caught between her teeth as she unpeeled a quickstrip and used it to stick the edges of one of the cuts together, adding another and another and another until a lattice of quickstrips held Cara’s skin together. “Someone should talk to Greef.”   


  
“Maybe they should.” Cara’s eyes had got caught on Omera’s face. She was beautiful when she was concentrating. “I think you just volunteered yourself.”   


  
“Oh, shut up,” Omera said, indistinctly. She finished off the second cut, and replaced the dressings, taping them back into place to make sure they’d hold. “Try punching people with your other arm for a little bit, okay?”   


  
“I’ll try,” Cara snorted. Omera’s eyes wandered up to her face, and she brushed a strand of hair out of Cara’s eyes. Cara smiled at her, and slipped her bad arm around Omera’s waist when she leaned in for a kiss.

“Definitely better than disinfectant,” Cara said, grinning against Omera’s mouth. “Thanks.”   


  
Omera bit her just hard enough to remind her not to be a fool, which only made Cara grin harder. She tipped herself back onto the bed, and pulled Omera with her. 

  
“Your hair’s wet,” Omera observed, breathless but annoyingly pragmatic.

“I don’t care.” 

“I do. Sit up.” 

Cara groaned, but sat up. “You’re very bossy, you know that?”   


  
“It’s for your own good.” Omera ransacked her bedside table for a brush and hairtie, and shifted to sit behind Cara, her legs either side of Cara’s hips. “I am not sleeping in a damp bed with you tonight.”

“Well, when you put it like that.” Cara shut her eyes. “I already brushed it.”

“I know,” Omera said. “This is supposed to be soothing.” 

“I’m not very soothed. You keep telling me what to do.”

Omera ran her fingers through Cara’s hair, light and soft, just enough nail on her scalp to remind her that Omera had teeth, and Cara felt herself melt into Omera’s touch. “Ssh,” Omera said, against the shell of Cara’s ear, and Cara closed her eyes.

“Not very soothed, huh,” Omera said, a few minutes later.

Cara snorted. “Fine. You win.”

“Of course I do.” Omera set the hairbrush down, and ran her fingers through Cara’s hair again, separating it into strands and braiding it. “You grew it out.”

Cara kept her eyes shut. “I guess.”

“It suits you,” Omera said. “You look happier.”

Cara cracked one eye open. “I don’t think that has to do with my hair.”   


  
“No. But even in your first few holomessages from here, you looked happier than you did before.” 

Cara opened both eyes, and thought about this. “I guess I found something I was looking for,” she said, at last.

“And then you invited me to come and see.”   


  
Cara’s heart double-thumped in her chest, but not in a bad way. “I did.”

Omera tied off the braid and put her arms around Cara, resting her cheek against Cara’s. “Thank you,” she whispered.

“Think I should be thanking you. I’m the one you just fixed up.”

Omera laughed into the skin of her throat, and Cara grinned, tilting her head against Omera’s. “If you want to thank me for that,” Omera said, “go close the door, and tidy this stuff off the bed.”

  
  


Time moved on. Cara fished the Nautolan out of the cells, extracted a fine from him, and put him back on his ship with the rest of his crew. Omera passed the mock test, and began to study to complete a secondary education equivalent diploma. Winta made friends, and Omera let her run around the town with them in packs, so long as she always made sure her homework was done first. They were little menaces, but law-abiding ones, and their shrieking laughter made Cara smile. The town seemed brighter for it.

She caught Winta climbing a roof-line one day, at the head of a group of children egging each other on, and squinted up at her. “Come down from there, kid. And you lot, don’t even think about following her.”

“You can’t tell me what to do,” Winta said, balancing precariously. The children whooped.

Kids these days. Cara had her heart caught in her mouth, but she kept her voice level. “It’s my job to keep everyone safe around here. What you’re doing is extremely unsafe.” 

Winta paused.

Cara sighed and folded her arms. “Get off the roof, Winta Anza, I won’t ask three times.”

“Why?”

“Why won’t I ask three times? Because it’s a waste of my time when I could just call your mother. Why get off the roof? Because if you break your neck, we won’t be able to fix you.”

Either one of these threats landed. Winta edged back along the roof and slid down a drainpipe to ground level. 

“You lot, run off home. Winta, come with me.”

“Are you going to lock me in a cell?” Winta jeered. 

Oh, it was one of those days, was it. Cara raised her eyebrows. “No. Much worse. I’m going to make you explain to your mother what you were doing on Mr Golim’s roof.”

Winta sighed and rolled her eyes. “If we hadn’t come here I wouldn’t have to listen to you.”   


  
“True. I didn’t make that call, so don’t blame me for it.”

“I know,” Winta groaned, dragging her feet. “Mama told me. How it wasn’t safe any more. It didn’t  _ look  _ not safe, I still think it was  _ stupid  _ -”   
  


“Your mother is not stupid,” Cara said, cutting the kid off. “And there are lots of things that aren’t safe and look safe.” She glared at the kid. “Like very climbable roofs. For instance.”

“You did worse things than climb roofs,” Winta accused. 

“Yeah, but I was old enough to make my own mistakes then.” Cara swiped open the front door and ushered Winta in. “Go on. Face the music.”

  
  


Winta got in a lot of trouble about the roof climbing, which Cara took as a cue to get out of the way. She patrolled the city, thinking about what Winta had said - how it wasn’t safe any more - and the few little hints that Omera had dropped in her holomessages, about why exactly she was thinking of moving on. It formed a strange and incomplete picture. Sitting at the desk she’d dragged into the lock-up, going over the documents Greef had dropped on her head ( _ Miss Omera certainly has a lot of interesting ideas for this town _ , complete with a faint waggle of the eyebrows that made Cara want to kick him in the shins, like a self-conscious child), she kept coming back to Winta’s disbelief, and Omera’s conviction.

  
_ It didn’t look not safe _ . But Omera hadn’t hesitated to leave, despite her determination to keep raising Winta in that backwater.

Cara waited until she got back, late at night, and found Omera sitting up in bed reading about public health to ask any questions.

“Hello,” Omera said absently, marking up a paragraph. “Who’s responsible for maintaining the sewers?”

“It would be the city council if we had one,” Cara said, taking off her chestplate. “There used to be an Imperial-controlled one, but they apparently didn’t give a shit about maintenance.”

Omera let out an unimpressed huff. “You shock me.” 

“What’s this got to do with that clinic you’re badgering Greef about?”   


  
“I’m not badgering him. I just presented a proposal.” Omera laid down her datapad. “It’s the basics of public health. The town’s growing and I don’t want anyone sinking new sanitary lines next to the aquifer, we only have two of them at the moment and we can’t just freighter in treated seawater.”

“I understood some of those words,” Cara said, wrapping herself in a towel and catching the loose shirt and shorts Omera tossed in her direction. “Individually. Wait a minute.”   
  


She ran herself through the fresher as fast as possible and dressed herself in the shirt and shorts before returning to the bedroom. She draped the towel over a radiator and dropped onto the bed, causing Omera’s datapad to bounce off her lap.

“I was reading that,” Omera said, without any bite. 

“Mm. Winta said something today that made me think.”

Omera, who had picked up the datapad, laid it back down again with a snort. “Was it an incredibly persuasive argument for being allowed to snap her neck climbing everything that doesn’t actually move around here?”   
  
“No,” Cara said. “She told me that you left Sorgan because it wasn’t safe any more, and she said it didn’t look unsafe to her.” She watched Omera’s profile, which had gone as still as if it had been carved in stone. “And I remembered you never told me exactly why you decided to leave.”

There was a long silence. Cara slid under the covers, and resigned herself to waiting, but after a while Omera set her datapad aside and folded her hands. 

“I could be wrong,” she said, quiet and level.

“Tell me anyway,” Cara said, staring at the ceiling.

  
“After you left, we had… visitors, from the government on Sugano. They came with… observers, who said they were part of a corporation’s social responsibility arm. Business philanthropy. It was called something like - Fresh Start Technologies, something like that. They’d just signed a big new contract for raw materials off the Sugano mining moons, and as part of the deal, they wanted to build - better roads, better schools, a hospital.”

Cara held her breath.

  
“They had someone with them who never gave a name,” Omera continued. “But he stank of Empire to me. An older man, unobtrusive. I would have said in his sixties. Human. Well-preserved. And he got people talking. Caben told him about the raiders.” Omera fell silent a second: Cara’s heart thundered in her ears. “I cut Caben off before he gave any details about you or Mando, but - he did mention my shooting, and that I insisted on staying and fighting. And the Imp looked at me, and I -”

Omera stopped talking abruptly, and Cara filled in the gaps. Someone who had known the Empire for the full twenty years probably knew what a clonetrooper looked like without the helmet, and someone who’d seen a clonetrooper in person could probably spot the resemblance between Omera and her long-dead father, and the shooting just sealed the deal. 

“He smiled,” Omera said, looking down at her hands. “He looked at me, and he smiled, and he said he was sure there would be opportunities for me, in Sorgan’s future. And for Winta. Caben told him Winta’s name.”

Her chest was rising and falling too fast: Cara sat up, letting the blankets spill down her, and dragged Omera into her arms. “Breathe,” she said. “Breathe.”

Omera clutched at her back. “I knew it wouldn’t be absolutely safe here,” she said, breath whistling in and out of her lungs, “I knew you’d only just cleared the place out. But I knew you’d fight with me. I wouldn’t have to convince you. And you wouldn’t say everything was fine. You wouldn’t be fooled.” 

“No,” Cara said, and stroked a hand down Omera’s back. “Breathe. Come on, Omera. Breathe.” 

“I think I’m breathing too much.” Omera sucked in a deep breath and held it, her head pressed against Cara’s chest through the soft worn fabric of her t-shirt, and then - after several long seconds - let it out. Her grip on Cara loosened. Cara flipped them over, and slid down in the bed, pulling a pillow into place under their heads, dragging the blankets back up, settling Omera’s back against her chest, feeling Omera’s ribs expand and contract as Omera got her breathing back under control.

“You’re right,” Cara said.

“What, I’m breathing too much?”

“No,” Cara said, flattening her hand over Omera’s stomach, letting her legs curl into the space behind Omera’s. “You don’t have to convince me. I’m glad you cleared the fuck out of there.”

Omera sighed. “I feel bad for the people I left behind.”

“Don’t,” Cara said. “I know you -  _ and  _ them. You warned them. They didn’t listen. You did what you could.”

Omera turned over and tangled her legs with Cara’s. “It wasn’t enough.”

  
  
“Sometimes,” Cara said, “it isn’t.”

Omera kissed her like she wanted to forget Cara had said that. 

  
  


“So,” Cara said, the next morning, when Omera was still brushing her teeth. “There’s a reason you want to do all this infrastructure stuff independently. I mean, make sure it’s home-grown.”

Omera met her eyes in the mirror, and she didn’t say anything, but she nodded.

  
  


The trooper came in disguise, but not so disguised that Ila didn’t recognise him by movement and voice, and he was quick, but not as quick as Omera. By the time Cara made it down the main street, his body had already hit the floor, and Omera was staring at him with a terrible look on her face and the blaster Cara had already guessed at in her free hand.

Cara knelt down beside the body and checked for a pulse. He wasn’t dead, though the ding on his head probably wouldn’t do him much good, and there was the scorch of a non-fatal blaster shot on his chest: two scorches, just over the heart.

“You didn’t kill him,” Cara observed. 

Omera blinked, and came back to life. She tucked the blaster back into concealment, and set her tray down on the nearest table.

“On the house,” she said to the customers.

“We should be buying drinks for a lady that shoots like that,” one of them joked - a Devaronian who would be on Cara’s shit list, if it weren’t fully occupied by Imperials right now. Omera gave him a tight smile and stepped away to pour a generous measure from the Corellian brandy on the highest shelf, and force it into Ila’s hands. Ila was trembling and sobbing.

Cara flipped the trooper over and cuffed him. “Men trying to buy her drinks is why she shoots that well,” she said. “Marten, help me take out the trash. Soyo, call up the Magistrate, tell him to meet me at the lockup.” 

  
  


Greef hurried, but he still didn’t make it there before Cara had tossed the trooper into a cell - one that directly faced the desk she’d set up, where she was now sitting with her feet up and a blaster to hand, watching him.

“I thought you would have killed him,” Greef said, without preamble. “Soyo said you looked fit to murder - and Miss Omera not that much better.”

“No,” Cara said. She took a large, crunching bite out of the apple she’d been saving for a snack. It tasted real, and sharp, and clear, when Cara had the dust and smoke and flame of the town Moff Gideon had ruined caught on the back of her throat. She chewed and swallowed deliberately. Nevarro didn’t belong to the Empire any more. It didn’t belong to Gideon. 

And Cara didn’t need convincing to fight back. 

“No,” she said again. “I want to know where he came from.”

“On that,” Greef said, soft and urbane but with bite in his voice, his eyes resting unfriendly on the still-unconscious trooper, “we agree.”

  
  


In the end, between Omera’s exams - six full hours of standardised tests, cooped up in the schoolroom office with the two other people taking the exams - and Winta’s class’s school trip to the nearby sea, both of them missed Mando’s entire visit. And the kid’s. They were both going to kill Cara.

“I have good news and bad news,” Cara said, when she met Omera at the schoolroom, and then was forced to add very quickly: “Not about Winta!”

The colour returned to Omera’s face. “Oh,” she said, letting go of the wall she’d clutched at. “Good.” 

“Good news first, or bad?” 

“Good,” Omera said, unhesitatingly. Cara took her arm, and steered her along the street towards their house.

“Good news is,” she said, “we blew up that Imperial outpost.” She felt the sigh of Omera’s exhale, and gripped her hand tighter. “Yeah. I know.”   
  


“Good,” Omera said unevenly. “That’s - good.” She sucked in another breath. “And the bad news?”

“Mando helped us do it, but he cleared off almost straight away. On a mission to get the kid back to his family.”   


  
“And you didn’t make him stay?” Omera exclaimed, coming to an abrupt halt. “Cara!”

“He was already in the air, kind of hard to argue with him,” Cara protested. 

Omera sighed. “That’s fair, I suppose.” She started walking again, and Cara followed along. “How is he? And the baby?”

“They both seemed well. Kid’s more talkative than he used to be. I mean, he doesn’t use actual words, but - he just reacts more. Plays more.” Cara shrugged helplessly. “I think - Yeah.”

Omera gave her a suspicious look, but changed the subject. “Mando’s deluding himself if he plans to take the child back to his family. Mando  _ is  _ his family.”

“Well, that’s what I think too, but you know what he’s like. Brain made of solid beskar. Matches the helmet. I’m not convinced there’s a head under there.”

Omera sighed again. “Well, he’ll get his mind round it or he won’t.” She opened the front door and let them both in; Cara locked it equally automatically behind them as Omera left her schoolwork supplies on the side and put the kettle on. “What was it you wanted to tell me, but not in the middle of the street?”   
  


Cara leaned against the kitchen table and tried to line her thoughts up. She kept thinking about that weedy doctor in hologram form, talking about transfusions, and those eerie tanks, like bacta but - but  _ not _ , without that familiar hum of life. 

“I think… we found where they were keeping the baby,” she said at last. “Before. I don’t know how he escaped, or how he was stolen, but - it wasn’t just a little outpost, Omera, there was a lot hidden in the rock.” 

Omera pulled out a chair and sat down on it, hard. “Go on.”

  
“The baby can use the Force,” Cara said slowly, and wiggled her fingers in illustration. “The things I’ve seen him do - it’s crazy. I think… The Imps had him, and they wanted that power, and they kept him in that bunker, and they must have been… taking blood from him, I don’t know, to put it in… volunteers.” She looked down at her feet in order to avoid looking at Omera’s ashen face. “I don’t even know if he’d ever seen another kid until he came to Sorgan. So… no wonder he lights up now. He hasn’t been treated like a person for years.”

Omera drew in a sharp breath, and held it for a long still moment.

Cara stared at her boots. They were filthy; she leaned down to pick at the laces, to take them off.

“Tell me you killed them all,” Omera said, very softly.

“We blew the whole thing sky-high,” Cara said. “Brought down a chunk of mountain. It’s gone.” 

“Good,” Omera said. “Good.”

She got up from her chair, and pulled Cara to her feet until she could wrap her arms around her, never mind the boots half-off, the dirt, the blood, the soot, and Cara buried her face in Omera’s shoulder and breathed her in until the kettle whistled and she realised her eyes were damp.

“How was your exam?” she mumbled.

“It was fine,” Omera said, and laughed unevenly, burying her hands in Cara’s loose hair and holding her closer. “It was fine.”

  
  


Cara hadn’t expected much when Greef reported the destruction of the Imperial base, and she didn’t get much. Sure, the New Republic were fairly prompt: it only took maybe a week for an X-wing pilot to show up, one of these patrol guys you got around the Rim. The visible representation of New Republic law enforcement in an orange jumpsuit with a single medium-weight blaster. They were probably more impressive if you didn’t remember the Rebel Alliance all that well. 

  
Cara wasn’t impressed. But hey: at least someone showed up.

Greef was in a meeting with the Bounty Hunters’ Guild, so Glefat showed him to Cara’s office and Cara dealt with the guy initially. She showed him the trooper still in the cells, and the readouts they’d got from flyovers of the base, showing no life signs - not that Cara trusted that as much as she did the fact that the place had been reduced to rubble: the base had been far more extensive than their original scans had shown.

“So you infiltrated it and blew it up,” the pilot said, taking notes.

  
Cara shrugged. “The troopers were trouble waiting to happen. I wasn’t going to hang around until they went after the clinic or the school.” She jerked her head. “We got this one because he got sloppy, thought no-one would recognise him out of uniform.”   
  


“Fuckin’ cantina girl fuckin’ shot me,” the trooper snarled. “Bit-”   
  


Cara smacked the bars and let them ring. “Maybe it should be a lesson to you not to fuck with cantina girls.” 

The pilot raised his eyebrows, but said only: “We’ll send someone to pick this one up. In case he knows anything useful.”

  
  
“Fuck you, fucking Republic scum!”

“Shut. Up,” Cara said, projecting her voice over his. She ushered the pilot out. “Sorry for the unpleasantness. As you can see, he’s got a mouth on him. Please feel free to take him off our hands whenever.”

“Preferably before he ends up in the lava rivers?” the pilot suggested. 

“This is a law-abiding town. I see to that myself.”

  
  
The pilot gave her a look which made her itch to punch him - some kind of weird form of respect that felt patronising. “I can believe it.” He looked around the main street. “It’s a nice place you have here.” 

“Isn’t it,” Cara said, the back of her neck prickling a warning. Her commlink buzzed just in time. “Magistrate Karga’s free to talk to you now.” She gestured at the door. “In there, on the right.”   


  
Something made her wait outside. She told herself it was wanting to be sure that Karga didn’t get them into trouble, or mention Mando’s name, and that she didn’t want a New Republic pilot running around loose getting into every corner of the town. And those were good reasons, and she still regretted it when he showed up with his little speech about Alderaan, and the New Republic, and something big happening in the Outer Rim.

She took the badge home, though, and left it on the kitchen table.

“What’s this?” Omera said, on her way out to another shift at the bar. She had been doing fewer, now the clinic was open, and as other projects - like a restored city council - gathered steam, but Ila was much happier now when Omera was around and wearing a blaster openly. 

“I don’t know,” Cara said. “Might be an offer. Might be a trap. Might be both.”

She held out a hand, and Omera tossed the badge across the room. It landed in her palm, dead on, perfect hit. “I need to think about it.”   


  
“We can talk about it later,” Omera said, “if you like.”

“Yeah,” Cara said, and smiled. “Later.”


End file.
